Bomb Blast Rocks Kabul -- By Jeffrey Stern | Newsweek

Visitors may think that Afghans are numb to violence, having witnessed so much. But the opposite is true. --- There are plenty of people on the streets of Kabul with guns, and the roar of an early-morning car bomb riles even the most war-weathered security guards. Kalashnikovs begin spitting rounds at nothing in particular. ---- Afghans tend to think according to their ethnic predispositions, and they will speak accordingly; no information from any source is without likely bias. Westerners have a hard time seeing the influence of ethnic allegiance, because Afghans pride themselves on hospitality, a central component of which is identifying what your guests want to see and then showing it to them. Racism is unappealing to Americans, who have little license for pride in their own history; to Germans, who generations later still harbor a collective, residual guilt; and to people from any of the other countries with a significant presence in Afghanistan.